Kaptio’s Student Interns Impress with their Final Project

This spring, a group of four students from the University of Reykjavík took on an ambitious, real-world project at Kaptio in tandem with their final semester of school. The team, affectionately known as Team Kapibara (the Kaptio version of the large South American rodent that experienced top-tier meme-status on TikTok last year), applied to take on Kaptio’s project specifically after listening to a variety of pitches from businesses around Iceland. After rounds of interviews, the team were selected in January to complete an actual active project for the Kaptio Travel platform that could one day be pushed into production.

“We liked that this was something other than basic web design or organizing a blog online, but a full project that included designing an API, doing back- and front-end tasks, and getting an opportunity to work alongside industry specialists”

The students, Daníel Kárason, Markús Víðir Fjölnisson, Eyþór Alexander Hildarson, & Laufey Matthildur Friðriksdóttir, are a combination of Computer Science and Software Engineering degree seekers in their third and final year at the university, where students must complete a capstone project for credit to graduate. The students write in their final report that they have known each other since their first semester of school, and since they have previously worked on school projects together, are already familiar with each others’ strengths and weaknesses; this made assigning tasks easier at the project’s beginning. The project team also included a wide array of Kaptio specialists in engineering, product, and design, as well as university leaders who teach a variety of computer science and engineering subjects and work internationally across technology industries.

Fun Challenge, Meaningful Work

The project involved development work that will be used in an upcoming release of Kaptio Travel, and the students were excited to be a part of a real team solving real problems. The work entailed creating a collection of modular components which Kaptio Travel customers can adopt and use on their webpages. These components would need to be extendible and rendered in different contexts such as browser, mobile and print (PDF).

From the project’s introduction directly:

“…multi-day tour operators are pushing for more detailed display of their itineraries to build their e-commerce solutions that are using their brand styling. Kaptio wants to pave the way for them to create a rich experience with components that communicate with Kaptio’s API out of the box that are ready to be customised. Currently Kaptio provides modular components which are attached to the Salesforce Customer Relationship Management system, that allow their customers to easily create websites tailored to their needs, using product data stored within Salesforce. This project aims to expand their potential customer base by offering additional methods for their customers to showcase their product data. The project involves rebuilding these components, so that they are completely independent from Salesforce, with the flexibility to use different APIs.”

The project consisted of a series of two-week sprints where students planned their work, tracked their progress, and then completed retrospectives at the end of each. Students completed agile, customer-focused user stories for each component to make sure they were designing and building features and workflows to meet customer needs. Over 50% of their time was dedicated to programming the solution, and thankfully, a good percentage of time went to documentation, which is a best practice for all companies who work asynchronously. Overall, the students devoted over 300 hours each to this project. 👏

Beyond the technical aspects of the project, the students said they really enjoyed getting a dedicated room in the Kaptio HQ office, and liked feeling like part of the Kaptio team. The students made use of the local pizza shop on the ground floor of the Kaptio office building, which is a unique perk of working for Kaptio in Iceland!

Exciting Results, both with technology solutions and future employment

The project deliverables included a variety of UI mock-ups and developed components for itinerary display, like timeline and payment components of an itinerary, as well as a fully functional, modular API. These results were tested, documented, and deployed for an internal test environment.

This project lays the groundwork for Kaptio to embolden the product offering in systems external to Salesforce. This independence means Kaptio can gain the flexibility to tailor Kaptio Travel more precisely to customers needs. Looking ahead, the components and information developed during this project will assist Kaptio in offering unique features within the Kaptio Travel ecosystem, helping customers make their purchasing process more streamlined and enjoyable for end- users. As Kaptio continues to build on this project, the focus will be on enhancing the components, adding new ones, and building an API that supports them, ensuring they meet the demands of the travel market.

🤩 Additionally, another exciting result of the project means two of the group members, Daníel and Eyþór, will be joining the Kaptio team full-time starting this summer. Congratulations on your successful project and welcome to the team!